There she goes

I dragged myself to work in time to do seven interviews before lunchtime, four on skype. Appointments were made. That's all good. Amazing how much highly qualified and highly talented people wanted two short term very part time jobs.

Afterwards I had another skype and then did a couple of things I'd been planning to do earlier in the week had I made it to the office, including printing out the final typescript of the book. Nice to have it in the hand. Quite a weighty tome! One of the things about it that I'm proudest of is the chapter on citizenship and populism, and I started this evening working on a blog post on the election and populism, and why I'm worried about British politics. But I'm too tired to finish it today, so it'll have to wait a day or two and I'll link to it when I'm done. I will say one thing, though, and that is that I found it chilling that Johnson gave his victory speech this morning in front of an obviously "pre-cooked" backdrop of 'the people's government'. Under our constitution which prides itself on representative democracy and parliamentary sovereignty, as we saw to dramatic effect in the prorogation ruling of the Supreme Court in September 2019, there is no such thing as a 'people's government'. It's setting us up for the people to be divided up - into them and us, the pure people, those who symbolise the real people. And them - those who can be excluded. Those EU citizens who took the guarantees of EU law on its own face value that they were 'second' not 'third' country nationals (technical terms), and apparently now have done so for too long. I am not happy about all of this in the slightest, so quite apart from the misgivings I have about this next government in terms of the policies it will deliver (and my complete distrust of Johnson's assertion that he will look after the interests of those Labour voters who swept him into power (albeit with just 1% more of the vote than May had in 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament, so this is no landslide of voters...)), my concerns are about whether we are going to see moves taken to bake Conservative Party hegemony into our electoral system. I will expand upon this in my blog post, as I said. But tonight, on very little sleep (although I went to bed quite early and tried to sleep...), I'm not really up to it.